For our newly releasing comic issue I had only a few comic pages to draw, so I offered to paint the cover, too. We (Caro, Asja and I) met in skype to discuss the cover image.

It turned out difficult to find a theme, because setting and characters were the same as in issue one.

The fox again? Ok, it's in the new story, too, and it's even more important. But the story is not exactly about it. We have three threads of story with each a woman as main character, but it took us some time to figure out how to put them on the cover. Many decisions were made on-the-go, while I was already working on the lines.

After wie decided the most important things, I made a layout sketch, so my colleagues could see if I depicted our idea correctly.

First the plan was to only draw Lotte. Shortly later we agreed to add old Mathilde, to tell more story.

I'm very happy that I have good experience with Photoshop, so executing ideas is mostly sweating, less thinking, particularly if one only applies 'iso'-perspective.

The fascade and window design of the location "Zum Goldenen Fuchs" ('Golden Fox Inn') was done by Asja and shown in a single panel of issue one. While already drawing, Asja showed me interior views of the 'Fox' and I had to add more windows to the left. Hail Copy-Paste!

The colours on the first cover were gloomy and we wanted a happier mood on the new cover. Caro had send us some colour blotches (A), before we had even decided what to put on the cover. Yellow was ok, but pink? I couldn't quite imagine the mix. Asja sent me her idea of the fascade colours, and I picked some colours from a picture in my collection (B). I instantly liked the peachy, friendly palette and startet painting, after my partners had nodded their agreement.

Asja helped me a lot with the drawing and inking of the characters (the back-cover fox, too). She's much more experienced in this field.

The inn sign had to go, because it clashed with our logo-header. Caro suggested and drew the graffiti tags. I only had to adjust them to look like they were drawn on the wall.

This simplified layer explosion shows my workflow.
A Background lines (usually I work them black on transparency, but it wasn't important here, because this layer is on the bottom for reasons)
B Background colours, Multiply mode
C Character colours, Normal mode
D Character lines, Normal mode
E All Colours, (BG+Chars), Multiply mode 40% Fill - to make the colours stronger

This is not really how my layers look, there are way more, of course. Usually I work on one layer for one element. Overlapping elements are drawn on a new layer, until I'm satisfied - then I merge down to keep the layers organised and get my machine to perform better.

I took my chance to paint in a very unorderly manner to break the artificiality of the lines. (Hope it comes out ok in the print).